Scott Horsley

Scott Horsley is a White House correspondent for NPR News. He reports on the policy and politics of the Obama Administration, with a special emphasis on economic issues.

The 2012 campaign is the third presidential contest Horsley has covered for NPR. He previously reported on Senator John McCain's White House bid in 2008 and Senator John Kerry's campaign in 2004. Thanks to this experience, Horsley has become an expert in the motel shampoo offerings of various battleground states.

Horsley took up the White House beat after serving as a San Diego-based business correspondent for NPR where he covered fast food, gasoline prices, and the California electricity crunch of 2000. He reported from the Pentagon during the early phases of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Before joining NPR in 2001, Horsley was a reporter for member station KPBS-FM, where he received numerous honors, including a Public Radio News Directors' award for coverage of the California energy crisis.

Earlier in his career, Horsley worked as a reporter for WUSF-FM in Tampa, Florida, and as a news writer and reporter for commercial radio stations in Boston and Concord, New Hampshire. Horsley began his professional career as a production assistant for NPR's Morning Edition.

Horsley earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and an MBA from San Diego State University.

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump seized on rising health insurance premiums Tuesday as evidence that "Obamacare is just blowing up." But the general manager of a Trump golf course in Florida corrected his boss for suggesting that Trump's own employees would be personally affected. "All of my employees are having a tremendous problem with Obamacare," Trump told reporters during an appearance at the National Doral Golf Club in Miami. "What they're going through with their health...

Psy-ops in the guest box continues at the third and final presidential debate. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both using guest tickets in a calculated effort to rattle their rivals, or at least send a signal to voters watching on TV. The in-your-face guest list includes two billionaire critics of Trump, the mother of a Benghazi victim, and President Obama's Kenya-born half-brother. Trump invited Malik Obama to sit in his silent cheering section after the president's relative endorsed...

Live by the leak, and you may die by the leak. That's the message Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is sending to his fellow Republicans, as he swears off using campaign material that originates with WikiLeaks. "Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow, it could be us," Rubio said in a statement. "I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of WikiLeaks," added Rubio, who is up for re-election. "As our intelligence agencies have said, these leaks are an effort by a foreign...

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine spoke to a church group in Miami over the weekend. That wouldn't be remarkable except that he spoke entirely in Spanish — a first for a candidate on a major-party ticket. "Yo soy cristiano, un católico" ("I'm a Christian, a Catholic") Kaine told parishioners at Pneuma Church at the beginning of his five-minute speech. Kaine described his background working as a missionary in Honduras, where he said he learned lessons about faith, family...

First lady Michelle Obama joined students from across the country Thursday in picking produce from the White House garden. It's the last such harvest of the Obama era. But the first lady has taken steps to ensure the garden — and the bumper crop of publicity and goodwill it generated — won't disappear once she and her husband leave the White House. The W. Atlee Burpee home gardening company and The Burpee Foundation have contributed $2.5 million to the National Park Foundation to maintain the...

Social Security alone consumes nearly a quarter of the federal budget. At this week's vice presidential debate, Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Mike Pence spoke about how the administrations they hope to join would deal with the challenges facing safety net programs like it. Social Security The Challenge Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program, in which benefits for retirees and others are largely funded through the payroll taxes collected from current...

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. DAVID GREENE, HOST: And I'm David Greene in Phoenix, Ariz. We are here as part of our Divided States project. We're visiting different battleground states during each of the four debates. Last night during the vice presidential debate, students gathered for a debate-watching party at the Student Union at the University of Arizona in Tucson. They were sitting around small cafe tables. They were ordering beer. They were watching the...